Movie notes: ‘Devil Inside’ scares off audiences

To no one’s surprise, ”The Devil Inside” fell off a cliff in its second weekend. But no one anticipated it would fall as far as it did.

After stunning box-office analysts with a $33.7 million opening-weekend take — easily two to three times better than even the most optimistic predictions — the exorcism mockumentary plummeted to barely more than $8 million last weekend. That’s a drop of 76 percent. Almost all movies lose a sizable percentage their second weekend, but not this much.

Not that it was terribly shocking. Opening weekend produced seemingly incongruous numbers — great box-office numbers, but lousy ratings from audiences. Must be something a bout the whole fake documentary genre and the way it has been marketed; it seems to induce an almost Pavlovian response among its fans. But unlike the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, this time the response was “We’ve been had!”

Anyway, the dropoff landed “The Devil Inside” on one of those specialty lists you don’t want to be on — the list of worst-performing second weekends (like baseball, the movie biz has stats for everything). Technically, it placed 21st, but almost all of the movies ahead of it made very little money, had much less publicity and opened on far fewer screens.

The last major film to drop this precipitously was the Jonas Brothers concert movie in 2009, but that’s understandable. Every JoBros fan rushed out to see it opening weekend.

The only other films that really belong in “Devil’s” league are “Friday the 13th” (80 percent drop in 2009) and “Star Trek: Nemesis” (76 percent in 2002).

But the distributor, Paramount Pictures, may still be laughing all the way to the bank (has anyone actually seen this happen in real life? Not me). BoxOfficeMojo analyst Ray Subers wrote, “Including Monday the movie has now made $47.5 million on a budget of less than $1 million, so it’s easy to imagine they aren’t too upset about this over at Paramount.”

But who knows? They could have killed the goose that lays the golden frights. More fake-documentary/found-footage films are said to be in the pipeline. But next time, audiences might not respond like Pavlov’s dog.